Computed Tomography (CT) is an important tool in diagnostic imaging. It plays a key role in diagnosis and intervention. Many advanced CT systems use wide detector arrays, multiple sources, and/or very fast rotation speed, for important clinical applications (e.g., coronary artery and whole organ perfusion imaging). As a result, modern CT scanners are expensive and are typically used by major hospitals and clinics in developed countries. Due at least in part to the expense, there is limited to no accessibility of CT systems for patients in rural areas of developing countries, disaster scenes, and battlefields.
Over the past decades, CT systems or methods have been proposed assuming linear translation-based scanning. These include a linear scan-based dental CT approach, a translation-based CT data acquisition method for imaging of a cable channel inside the corner formed by two walls in a building, and a linear scan CT system with a wide fan-angle source, a large-area detector, and an advanced image reconstruction algorithm. None of these proposed systems use interior tomography or are capable of ultra-low-cost CT in the case of general dose-effective medical applications.